The Stolen (3 page)

And now Chloe began to understand why.

“Anyway, think of it, Chloe! You have a real family now—people who are related to you by blood and who share your heritage! And you know what?” He pounded his fist on the palm of his other hand, causing Chloe to jump back.
“I'll
sponsor you. You can't live here all the time—”

“What about my mother? When can I go back?” Chloe didn't want to offend Sergei, but all of this family talk did bring Chloe's mind back to her mom.

Sergei sighed and shook his head. “Not anytime soon, I'm afraid. The Tenth Blade is trying to track you down. They believe you killed Alexander Smith; the streets are crawling with their agents. If you leave, you will be dead before you get halfway across town.”

“Can I call her at least?” Chloe thought it might be best to ask this before admitting that she already had….

“I'm sorry, Chloe, but no. Even if the Tenth Blade hasn't tapped her lines, they are almost certainly monitoring her every move. And if your mom called the police, then her line is
definitely
tapped.”

“But … won't she be suspicious? Where does she think I am? Oh my God—what are my
teachers
going to think when I don't show up on Monday?”

Sergei ticked off his fingers. “Your mother is being informed that you are part of a federal witness protection program and that she will be allowed to speak with you as soon as it's safe. Your school has been informed that you have come down with mono and will be out for a while.” Sergei smiled. “We have even given them an address to send your homework,” he added, satisfied with himself.

Chloe flinched.
Did it have to be mono? The kissing disease? Couldn't it have been Ebola or mad cow or something you don't get from sucking face?

Sergei fixed her with unamused eyes, noticing her reaction. “It is the most logical debilitating sickness for a teenager to come down with.”

“It's just that everyone's going to think, well, whatever …” Chloe said, resigned.

Everything sucked. She couldn't talk to her mom; she couldn't even tell her mom the truth; the whole school would be laughing at her; and she was stuck here for a while. It wasn't that she wanted to
leave,
precisely, but she wanted the option. And then there was the idea
of an entire city blanketed with men who wanted to kill her. Whose purpose was to kill her. Her, Chloe King. Sixteen and harmless.

“I didn't kill him!” she said, the anger in her voice surprising even her. “When he slipped, I tried to
help him back up!
”

“Why would you do that?” Sergei asked, genuinely surprised.

“I don't know, I just … I don't know. It seemed like the right thing to do.” Chloe shrugged helplessly; she couldn't explain it.
It's just what you do
. “Who
are
these people anyway?”

“The Tenth Blade exists solely to wipe us out,” Sergei said, putting his hands back on her shoulders, a black and serious look in his eyes. “They believe the Mai are evil, sent by the devil or some such nonsense. They only tolerate us here because it is harder to kill people out of hand in America than elsewhere….” His eyes glazed as he thought about another time and place. Then he refocused. “And as long as we don't draw too much attention to ourselves, we are more or less safe.” He spat viciously. “We have to hide like
rats
here.” He waved his hand around the room, a room that Chloe personally didn't think would be out of place in the White House, much less a place for rats. “They fear our power. We are stronger, faster, and quieter than they—we should be revered, not annihilated.”

He was silent for a moment, seething.

“Well, I'm sure Olga is having someone make up a real room for you,” Sergei said, lighthearted again in a flash. “I have to go to a meeting now, but you should go to the library and learn the history of our people. Simone and Ivan will be notified about our newest resident. You have complete run of the place. Goodbye, Chloe, and welcome!” He gave her one last bear hug and then ushered her out, pushing her lightly on the back.

“Wait! One more question!” Chloe begged.

“Yes?” He paused just as she was over the threshold.

“Why are so many people here on a
Saturday
?”

“This is
real estate
!” he said as he began shutting the door behind her. “We never really close!”

She just stood there, dazed for a moment, thinking about everything Sergei had said.
Blood tests? Goddesses? Thousands of years old?
A fax beeped somewhere, breaking her reverie. This was a strange place for ancient hunters to gather.

The girl in the ugly, sparkly T-shirt told Chloe how to get to the library and then ignored her.

Chloe wandered off. She felt disoriented and ghostly in this half-modern, half-old place; not properly belonging but somehow connected with it. There was no one around she knew, nothing familiar, yet she was probably safer than she had been anywhere for the past month. A refugee in the home of the people who really were her family.
Her … pride
… It was all too much, yet so far they all seemed painfully normal. Olga with her cell
phone and Sergei with his businessman's attitude. Chloe realized she was expecting them to act secretive and weird, like vampires.

And to
not
be involved with stuff like real estate.

The library, like everything in the mansion, was spectacular and perfect and right out of an English costume drama: built-in wall-to-wall bookshelves, infinitely high windows between parenthetical pairs of infinitely long velvet drapes that were just a touch faded. She walked along one immaculate bookcase, looking at the titles. Most of them were classics or encyclopedias—though there was a case devoted to modern books like
Bridget Jones's Diary
. One shelf had a pair of bookends in the form of Egyptian cats—Bastet, Chloe realized, and it was the same one on Amy's necklace, a house cat with a slight smile and an earring. The other was a lion with her teeth bared. In between the two were books with titles like
The History of the Mai, Essays on Mai Origins, Res Anthro-Felinis
. Chloe picked one up and flipped through the pages, already bored and intimidated by the old-fashioned font and paragraph-long sentences.

She sighed and threw herself into a chair.

“What do we
do
now
?”

Behind them another helicopter was circling the bridge. They had been hovering like pissed-off dragonflies off and on since Friday night. Paul and Amy hoped that the National Guard had caught up to Chloe and whoever was attacking her and split them up—but almost a day had passed, and it didn't look like there had been any resolution.

Paul thought he'd seen a body fall from the bridge, but he didn't say anything about it to Amy.

“Well?” his girlfriend demanded again.

Paul sighed.

“I don't know—what do
you
think we should do?”

“Call her mom …?” But even as she suggested it. Amy trailed off, knowing that it probably wasn't the right thing to do—or, more importantly, that it wasn't what Chloe would want. She ran her hands through her chestnut hair in exasperation, pulling on the roots. It
was a leftover habit from when she was younger and tried to flatten her big, often frizzy hair every chance she got. “What do you think it was all about—
really
?”

They'd had this conversation several times in the last twenty-four hours, but somehow Amy was never satisfied with Paul's answers.

“I don't know. Drugs? Gangs? Some weird psycho game of tag?”

“Maybe it's got to do with her real parents or something. Maybe she's actually some sort of Russian Mafia princess.”

Paul gave her a lopsided smile. Silently they started to walk home, not holding hands or anything. Like they had in the old days, when the three of them were just good friends. Before Chloe almost died from falling off Coit Tower. Before she and Amy got into that weird little snit they were in for days—and had just patched up. Before Chloe started seeing Alyec and Brian …

“You know,” Paul said slowly, “a
lot
of weird shit has happened with Chloe in the last couple of months, don't you think?”

Amy shrugged. “Seems to me she got her period and turned into a total bitch. For a while, at least,” she added hastily. Chloe might have been a bitch, but she was still Amy's best friend, and she was still missing.

“No, it's more than that.” Paul frowned, crinkling his long white forehead. “I mean like her fall and the bruises on her face and her random absences from
school—not to mention being totally incommunicado about general Chloe life issues.”

“She was going to tell us everything,” Amy remembered. “On the bridge … She was just about to explain
something
….”

“…when that freak with knives showed up.” They looked at each other for a long moment.

“We were talking about her crush on
Alyec
when she jumped off Coit Tower,” Amy suddenly pointed out.

“She didn't jump, she fell,” Paul said, surprised at the way Amy said that. She was the only person on the planet who probably knew Chloe better than he did, and it was a really weird thing to say about their friend. At no point in her life, even at her gothiest moments, had Chloe ever seemed the suicidal sort.
A jackass, sometimes, but never suicidal
. Jumping up onto the ledge to get more attention had been a little rash, but they had been drinking, and it wasn't completely out of the range of typical Chloe behavior.

“Whatever,” Amy said quickly, dismissing it. “Her life started going crazy after that. I'll bet it has something to do with him.”

“That's insane. How could
thinking
about him have anything to do with getting mugged or whatever?” Paul asked. He tried not to laugh or smile but couldn't stop his dark eyes from twinkling. Fortunately Amy wasn't looking directly at him.

“No! Think about it.” She began counting off facts on the tips of her black glitter fingernails. “She was mugged
right after we all split up at The Raven, then became a total hag when she started actually dating Alyec—and he's Russian, just like her. Maybe he's got her into something
bad
.”

“What about
Brian
, then?” Paul demanded. “As long as we're accusing random people of having somehow screwed up Chloe's life and sent assassins after her. Brian, the mysterious sort-of boyfriend who never kissed her, who isn't in school, and, most importantly—
who we've never seen?
”

Amy stared at him with blank blue eyes, at a loss for an answer. He was about to add a few more salient facts that proved she was a complete wacko with insubstantial—
crazy
—arguments, but then he noticed Amy's lips trembling and tears forming on her lower lids.

“She'll be okay. The National Guard is out there. We can call the police if you want or her mom later—let's say if we haven't heard from her in a few hours. Okay?”

Amy nodded miserably, and they continued walking home.

Amy looked into
the bottom of her locker hopefully. Nope, nothing. She was always making cute little notes for Paul and slipping them into
his
locker. Sometimes they were quick scrawls—
See you in English!
—and sometimes they were really intricate things she made the night before with cloth and her glue gun and stuff.

Not. Once. Had he ever done the same for her. She didn't want to outright
ask
—but how strongly did a girl have to hint? Now that she was finally dating a nice, nonpsycho boy, she figured she should cash in on some of the perks that were supposed to go along with it. She was being stupid, she knew, and selfish: Paul did all other kinds of nice boyfriendy things, like buying tickets ahead of time for movies they wanted to see and getting her a coffee at the café if she asked. And he would talk to her for
hours
on the phone about all sorts of things….